The New York Times has a story highlighting the problems facing European police agencies. It turns on a particular case out of Germany, one in which a refugee turned terrorist without the European police having any idea. Fortunately, American intelligence tipped them to the terrorist in question before he could stage the attack he was planning. German attempts to arrest him failed, however, and he escaped back into the flood of Syrian refugees. Only when other refugees turned him in were they able to capture him.

And then, before they could interrogate him for any intelligence, he hung himself.

The takeaway for the Times is that the Europeans are too reliant on American capacities.

[A] series of [attacks] in Germany, France and elsewhere has exposed the lack of knowledge about the backgrounds of many, if not most, of the newcomers and the potential for them to be radicals or to be radicalized after arriving in Europe.

On both fronts, the situation is creating a particular political tension in Germany. The National Security Agency’s activities are under fierce scrutiny in Germany by a seemingly never-ending special parliamentary committee.

“American agencies are Europe’s best counterterrorists,” said Peter Neumann, a terrorism expert at King’s College London.

Germany’s lawmakers have passed a new spy law that is intended to address some of these challenges. They are not the first to do so. In the wake of the Belgian attacks, Italy’s Prime Minister called for a more unified European response to terrorism. One of the criticisms facing Europe’s response is that it lacks a central police agency like the FBI that can act directly on terror threats across national borders the way the FBI does across state borders.

On the other hand, Marc Tyrell at Small Wars Journal rightly points out that a higher-level bureaucracy is often necessarily blind to street-level indications of danger. Likewise, the classification of information within major Federal agencies like the CIA and FBI often means that communication doesn’t flow downward to local police agencies either. There is no guarantee that adding another level of protection will work, especially not if that level of protection is placed behind classification walls.

Likewise, there is a concern about focusing on the right set of dangers. Spying resources are only helpful if they are properly targeted, but Europe has so far seemed inclined to focus its increased resources on its own citizens instead of the influx of refugees. For example, Germany has engaged in police raids targeting those who express concern about the refugee influx. In London, an expensive new cyber security unit — targeting online activity of citizens — will focus not on radical Islam but on “cyber hate speech.”

The scale of the crisis also poses challenges. Belgian police correctly identified some of the Brussels bombers, but had to drop its inquiry into them because it could not spare the resources for that particular case. German police are likewise facing a crime wave that is overwhelming their available resources. Leaked reports indicate that German police only expect this refugee crime wave to worsen.

[O]f these 1,000 or so suspected terrorists, the FBI only has the resources to thoroughly monitor a select few. The precise number of round-the-clock FBI surveillance teams is classified… but sources familiar with Bureau resources say that the number is “shockingly” low, only in the dozens. At one point last year, sources reported that the Bureau was watching 48 people intensely, a number that is towards the upper limit of the FBI’s regular surveillance resources.

That means that even of the 1,000 American citizens and residents that the government believes are most at-risk of executing a terror attacks—the top .0003 percent most radical threats among the nation’s 330,000,000 residents—only around 5 to 10 percent are under 24-hour watch.

The United States is far richer than most nations in Europe. It has a government committed to building out the security state. It has far fewer Muslims, both in raw numbers and as a percentage, and it has accepted only a small percentage of the refugees that Europe has done. If the United States simply cannot keep up with the terror threat as it stands today, Europe cannot hope to do so.

And that is with the crisis as it stands. The upcoming Russian-led offensive against Aleppo will bring a new wave of refugees. The offensive against Mosul, meanwhile, is expected to produce at least a million more just by itself. Some other solution than admitting floods of refugees, and then trying to police them, must be adopted.

“Allah requires from the believers to be masters of the land where they live, and only they can have property, and only we will be able to own the land.” — Muslim migrants in Crete, Greece.

The migrants were ready to wage jihad because they believed a rumor about an event for which, even had it been true, the Greek State and its inhabitants had no responsibility.

The establishment in Greece is a miniature of the American establishment: politicians and institutions of government corrupted to the bones.

We Greeks have already been crushed by Islam, by the twentieth century genocide in Turkey and the more recent Turkish occupation of Cyprus, again with the world’s complicity.

What is happening in Greece, as in much of Europe, is actually a massive replacement of its population, its values and its way of life.

The mainstream political parties obey the self-destructive EU policies on immigration that could eventually cause the end of the Hellenic-Judeo-Christian values of Europe, such as individual freedom, critical thinking and dispassionate inquiry.

What does an occupation army do when it is installed in a country? It occupies the land, forcing residents to follow its own way of life. It implements measures against the country’s inhabitants, it propagandizes its beliefs and uses force to have them imposed.

This, sadly, is what has been happening in Greece from the migrants who seem to “forget” that they are hosted in Greece and force the Greeks to feel like guests in their own country.

If someone is a war refugee or his life is in danger in his homeland, it would seem appropriate, when he arrives in the country which offers him asylum, to be grateful to this country, respect its history, its people its values and its laws. The same would hold true for an immigrant who wants to go to a country where he hopes he will find a better future.

In Greece, conversely, illegal immigrants — all of whom the media call “refugees,” apparently trying artificially to legalize them in the moral consciousness of citizens — have been occupying spaces that do not belong to them, using violence, blocking roads, committing crimes against public property, acting aggressively toward residents and the police, and saying that they feel offended when they see symbols that represent Christianity. The guests seem to be trying to take over the house.

A few weeks ago, 200 North Africans and Pakistanis rioted in the middle of the night, demanding to leave Mytilene Island. They were chanting, “Jihad! Jihad!”, smashing the residents’ cars in the center of the island and disrupting the local community. The migrants claimed that someone told them about the death of seven migrants on a ship, so they rose up against the authorities. The police and NGO workers explained that this was misinformation, but the 200 migrants were evidently not interested in hearing that. The migrants were ready to wage jihad because they believed a rumor about an event for which, even had it been true, the Greek state and its inhabitants had no responsibility. The authorities were unsuccessful at calming them down and trying to make them return to their living area.

As it turned out, there were no dead migrants; the uprising was a “mistake,” but the police and the locals had to spend the night tracking down refugees and migrants on the streets of Mytilene.

The illegal immigrants stated that the information about the seven dead migrants came through phone calls to them during the night. Police sources say, off the record, that this incident has all the hallmarks of covert “black operations.”

A few days later, on September 19, 2016, on Mytilene Island again, there was a new eruptionfrom migrants in the Moria district. This time, the information the migrants heard, which again turned out to be false, was that they were about to be returned to Turkey. Immediately they set fire to 16 acres of olive trees, as well as to the camp in which they were living.

Now 300 migrants, who had earlier escaped from their camp and tried to protest in the center of the island, were burning everything in the camp and the area around it, until the police stopped them and made them to return to the camp, where again they tried to burn everything.

Residents saw their groves of olive trees turn to cinders as well as much of the migrant camp, three shipping containers, clothing and footwear.

Some of the illegal immigrants were taking selfies during the burning and chanting, “Allahu Akbar” [“Allah is the Greatest”].

The Port of Mytilene Island was turned into a battlefield, where migrants and many Greek “leftists” tried to prevent the military contingent from lowering the Greek flag in front of the town’s old port. Many Greeks hate the national flag. They appear to prefer multinational states without any references to the state’s national foundations. They were chanting slogans and provoking both the military contingent and the people of Mytilene Island, who watched amazed from the opposite side of the road. It was a demonstration of power from behalf of “leftists” and illegal immigrants. Many citizens of Mytilene Island evidently could not stand to see the illegal immigrants and other Greeks provoke them and try to halt the lowering of the flag. So some citizens moved aggressively against them and engaged them in street fights.

Every Sunday morning on Mytilene Island, soldiers hoist the flag and in the evening, an hour before sunset, soldiers lower the flag. A week after this incident, thousands of Greeks gathered around the soldiers and the flag in Mytilene Port and were singing Greek National Anthem, showing their faith and honoring the national symbol. People are scared. They are gathering around the flag and the Army apparently because they feel they are losing their homeland and their sovereignty to the thousands illegal immigrants who have occupied their island.

On September 26, 2016, in the Tympaki region of the island of Crete, people found all over the streets quotes from the Quran. The text, signed by the “Muslim Brotherhood of Crete Island”,stated among other things:

“You are the senior people of the whole world, Only your faith counts and no one else has the right of life and death and ownership over every other person who dares to challenge your leadership and will not embrace your faith.

“Allah requires from the believers to be masters of the land where they live, and only theycan have property, and only we will be able to own the land.

“Allah said that we should conquer all the planet, and the faithful ones should own the land and the crops.

“Unbelievers cannot have land and crops because it belongs only to us – the believers.

“Unbelievers will have from us – as the holy Quran assures us – only alms.”

On the same day, September 26, in the Asprovalta region near the city of Thessaloniki, a 49-year-old man from France who came to Greece through Turkey was followed by police officers because he was suspected of being a jihadist. The moment he saw the police car, he rammed it, while chanting “Allahu Akbar”. [Allah is the greatest”] The attacker was arrested and the district attorney ordered his deportation.

A month ago, the inhabitants of Vavilon, a small village in Chios, another island that received a large number of illegal immigrants, decided to take the law into their hands, because, it seems, the state was not protecting them. The residents set up a militia to protect their families and their property from illegal immigrants. Within a week, they had recorded more than ten burglaries and vast property damage.

The media covers these disruptions only when they are like earthquakes, when one large one causes major disasters; the small ones are evidently not interesting. The same indifference of the media can also be seen regarding daily problems caused by the illegal immigrants. The media covers drug trafficking, conflicts between migrants of different Islamic doctrines, rebellions in migrant shelters, conflicts between countries and races, and underage boys and girls being raped. On September 24, in the Moria area of Mytilene Island, four 17-year-old migrants from Pakistan raped an underage Pakistani migrant, age 16, and recorded the rape with their phones. The police arrested the perpetrators, who had been blackmailing the boy before they raped him.

Illegal immigrants have also been blocking roads in many cities; halting traffic for hours. They occupy the roads whenever they feel like it; the police do not stop them and there are no arrests.

The Greek government has been friendly to the migrants. Illegal immigrants have, in an apparent demonstration of power, been asking Greek drivers to show their IDs and driver’s licenses. They have established checkpoints as an occupation army does. The government and the police did nothing to stop them. People showed their documents because of the great numbers of migrants; the drivers were evidently scared for their lives and their cars, and did not want things to get nasty. If you consider that the police were just watching all this passively, the drivers did not have much choice.

Another day, illegal immigrants blocked a road because they apparently did not have a good enough internet connection in the “refugee shelter.”

How would Americans feel if Muslim illegal immigrants living in America said that they were offend by the Statue of Liberty because she was not wearing a burqa?

The Archbishop of Athens and All Greece, Hieronymus, last March removed his cross, the symbol of Christianity, from his vestments during his visit to the Port of Piraeus, in order, he said, not to “offend” the Muslim migrants.

Archbishop Hieronymus of Athens and All Greece is pictured distributing food to migrants at the Port of Piraeus. The Archbishop removed his cross from his vestments during the visit to Piraeus, in order, he said, not to “offend” the Muslim migrants. (Image source: HellasNewsTv video screenshot)

Who warned him that Muslim migrants would be offended by his cross? What would they do if the Archbishop visited them while wearing his cross? Would they kill him? Would they burn the city of Piraeus? They would wage jihad against the Greek people?

Why are we hiding the symbols of our faith from people who come illegally and uninvited into our countries? What power could make an Archbishop remove the symbol of his faith, apart from a country’s political power?

The problem in Greece is not only the government or the mismanagement of illegal immigration. All traditional mainstream political parties in Greece, directly or indirectly, have been encouraging illegal immigration and the transfer of huge Muslim populations into Greek society. They obey the self-destructive EU policies on immigration that could eventually cause the end of the Hellenic-Judeo-Christian values of Europe, such as individual freedom, critical thinking and dispassionate inquiry.

We Greeks have already been crushed by Islam, by the twentieth century genocide in Turkey — that even now targets anyone not Muslim such as Christians, Alevis and Kurds — and the more recent Turkish occupation of Cyprus, again with the world’s complicity.

In spite of that, the mainstream political parties clearly do not care about protecting the nation, its identity or the safety of its citizens.

The establishment in Greece is a miniature of the American establishment: politicians and institutions of government corrupted to the bones, mainstream media and oligarchical fans of globalization. Greece is, in fact, being paid 198 million euros for the refugees.

The Greek establishment suffers from the same symptoms as Western European and American regimes. They no longer believe in the foundations of the Republic: “Vox Populi, Vox Dei”: the voice of the people is the voice of God.

The political establishment, when the public does not agree with their policies about illegal immigration and the protection of national identity, prefers to blame the voters for immaturity, stupidity or fascism. So as the voters persist in retaining their views for national identity and against illegal immigration, the elites in Greece are replacing the native population by giving the illegal immigrants citizenship.

That is their solution to the migration crisis and Greece’s economic meltdown, from failed authoritarian policies of the unelected, unaccountable and untransparent EU. What is happening in Greece, as in much of Europe, is actually a massive replacement of its population, values and way of life. There is only one way now to save what is left of Greece: The British way. Exit. Now.

Much of what we loosely call the western world will not survive this century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most European countries. There’ll probably still be a geographical area on the map marked as Italy or the Netherlands – probably – just as in Istanbul there’s still a building known as Hagia Sophia, or St Sophia’s Cathedral. But it’s not a cathedral; it’s merely a designation for a piece of real estate. Likewise, Italy and the Netherlands will merely be designations for real estate.

That’s just for starters. And, unlike the ecochondriacs’ obsession with rising sea levels, this isn’t something that might possibly conceivably hypothetically threaten the Maldive Islands circa the year 2500; the process is already well advanced as we speak. With respect to Francis Fukuyama, it’s not the end of history, it’s the end of the world – as we know it.

The clever chaps at The Economist called it “alarmist“, as did Tarek Fatah in my own magazine,Maclean’s. The Economist is as complacently globalist as ever, but Mr Fatah has since somewhat revised his view:

Steyn was right and I was wrong.

He’s, er, not wrong about that. America Alone did not get everything right. But, if you’d read it more attentively than The Economist did, Europe’s 2016 summer of terror would not have surprised you. Many influential persons did, in fact, read the book, including President George W Bush, Democrat vice-presidential nominee Joe Lieberman, Spanish prime minister José Maria Aznar, British Brexiteer Michael Gove, etc. But evidently Hillary Clinton, Angela Merkel and many others did not – and so here we are, a decade later. All this week we’ll be marking the tenth anniversary by running a few excerpts from the book. Let’s start today with some more from that Prologue:

It’s the end of the world – as we know it. Does that make me sound as nuts as Al Gore and the rest of the eco-doom set? It’s true the end of the world’s nighness isn’t something you’d want to set your watch by.

Indeed. After running through some of the more apocalyptic predictions of Sixties and Seventies environmentalists, I concede:

None of these things occurred. Contrary to the doom-mongers, millions didn’t starve and the oil and gas and gold didn’t run out, and, though the NHL now has hockey franchises in Anaheim and Tampa Bay, ambitious kids are still unable to spend their winters knocking a puck around the frozen Everglades. But that doesn’t mean nothing much went on during the last third of the 20th century. Here’s what did happen between 1970 and 2000:

In that period, the developed world declined from just under 30 per cent of the global population to just over 20 per cent, and the Muslim nations increased from about 15 per cent to 20 per cent.

Is that fact less significant to the future of the world than the fate of some tree or the endangered sloth hanging from it? In 1970, very few non-Muslims outside the Indian sub-continent gave much thought to Islam. Even the Palestinian situation was seen within the framework of a more or less conventional ethnic nationalist problem. Yet today it’s Islam-a-go-go: almost every geopolitical crisis takes place on what Samuel Huntington, in The Clash Of Civilizations, calls “the boundary looping across Eurasia and Africa that separates Muslims from non-Muslims.” That looping boundary is never not in the news. One week, it’s a bomb in Bali. The next, some beheadings in southern Thailand. Next, an insurrection in an obscure resource-rich Muslim republic in the Russian Federation. And then Madrid, and London, and suddenly that looping, loopy boundary has penetrated into the very heart of the west. In little more than a generation.

1970 doesn’t seem that long ago. If you’re in your fifties or sixties, as many of the chaps running the western world today are wont to be, your pants are narrower than they were back then and your hair’s less groovy, but the landscape of your life – the look of your house, the lay-out of your car, the shape of your kitchen appliances, the brand names of the stuff in the fridge – isn’t significantly different. And yet that world is utterly altered. Just to recap those bald statistics: In 1970, the developed nations had twice as big a share of the global population as the Muslim world: 30 per cent to 15 per cent. By 2000, they were at parity: each had about 20 per cent.

And by 2020…?

Well, by 2020, it will be impossible to compare statistics between “the Muslim world” and the west – because Islam is currently responsible for most population growth in English, French and German cities, and the principal supplier of immigrants to Canada, and already 25 per cent of the population of the European Union’s capital city, Brussels. Ten years ago, my line about mediation between Islam and the “host community” being the “principal political dynamic” in western Europe also struck many as “alarmist”, but after this last summer in Germany and France and Sweden it’s inarguable:

September 11th 2001 was not “the day everything changed”, but the day that revealed how much had already changed. On September 10th, how many journalists had the Council of American-Islamic Relations or the Canadian Islamic Congress or the Muslim Council of Britain in their rolodexes? If you’d said that whether something does or does not cause offence to Muslims would be the early 21st century’s principal political dynamic in Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium, France and the United Kingdom, most folks would have thought you were crazy. Yet on that Tuesday morning the top of the iceberg bobbed up and toppled the Twin Towers.

This book is about the seven-eighths below the surface – the larger forces at play in the developed world that have left Europe too enfeebled to resist its remorseless transformation into Eurabia and call into question the future of much of the rest of the world. The key factors are:

Just so. My argument was straightforward. The western world is going out of business because it’s given up having babies. The 20th century welfare state, with its hitherto unknown concepts such as spending a third of your adult lifetime in “retirement”, is premised on the basis that there will be enough new citizens to support the old. But there won’t be – so Europe decided to import the babies it couldn’t be bothered having itself. Ten years ago, one of the first interviews I did was with Paul Gigot, editor of The Wall Street Journal, on his TV show “The Journal Editorial Report“:

STEYN: Seventeen European countries have what demographers call lowest-low fertility, from which no society has ever recovered. That means they are basically not having enough babies.

And the way Europe is set up, they have these unsustainable social programs and welfare. And they imported the babies that they didn’t have. They imported them essentially from the North Africa and the Middle East.

So we’re seeing one of the fastest population transformations in history, whereby an aging ethnic European population is being replaced by a Muslim population. And the Muslims understand that, in fact, Europe, as they see it, is the colony now.

GIGOT: Is there any way that Europe can avoid being Islamacized in this way?

STEYN: Well, I think, to be honest, some of theEastern European nations didn’t throw off communism in order simply to throw their lot in with the doomed French and Belgians and Dutch 15 years later. And I think Poland and Hungary and so forth, will be determined not to go down the same path that the West Europeans have.

That observation has been borne by the different reactions to the “refugee” “crisis” by, say, Germany and Sweden on the one hand and Poland and Hungary on the other.

GIGOT: Is the problem only demographics or is it somehow broader, a kind of lack of intellectual confidence, cultural confidence… I remember during theCold War, there was a strain of pessimism about whether the West would prevail in that conflict.James Burnham, the great strategist, wrote about the suicide of the West.

And some people, as late as the late 1980s, were still saying we’re going to lose the Cold War. Yet we won that because the West had a great — demonstrated a lot of resilience, democratic resilience.

Why is this conflict, in your view, different?

STEYN: Well, I think we understood then, anyone who meet Czechs or Hungarians or Poles or any of these people on the other side of the Iran Curtain during the Cold War, understood that they actually had no dog in the fight. They weren’t interested. They weren’t interested in conquering the world.

And I think it is different now. I think the average Muslim does, in some basic sense, when he immigrates to the Netherlands, when he immigrates to the United Kingdom, when he immigrates to Canada or Michigan, wants eventually to live in a Muslim society in those places. And he expects effectively — I am not saying he wants to fly planes into buildings or any of that nonsense — but his expectation is that the host society will assimilate with him rather than the other way around.

And that’s a profound challenge in a way that communism wasn’t.

When America Alone came out all those years ago, another early interview was by the indefatigable Michelle Malkin for her then new Hot Air website. It stands up pretty well a decade later. Click below for Part One:

As you can see from the above video, time has beaten the hell out of me this last decade, although not Michelle – and not my thesis. This is the biggest story of our time, and, ten years on, the west’s leaders still can’t talk about it, not to their own peoples, not honestly. And they’re increasingly disinclined (as Angela Merkel fumed to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg) to let you talk about it. Yet, for all the “human rights” complaints, and death threats from halfwits, and subtler rejections from old friends who feel I’m no longer quite respectable, I’m glad I brought up the subject. And it’s well past time for others to speak out.

The Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia, all former Communist countries, also oppose the EU plan to relocate 160,000 “asylum seekers,” which they say is an “EU diktat” that infringes on national sovereignty.

“One of the principals underpinning the system is the primacy of EU law.” — Margaritis Schinas, chief spokesperson for European Commission.

“In the early autumn of 2015 we erected a fence on the external green border of the European Union and the Schengen Area. This was to protect the European Union’s greatest achievement: free movement within the common area of the internal market…. We do not want to distribute the migration burdens falling on Europe, but we want to eliminate them: to put an end to them.” — Hungarian President Viktor Orbán, July 11, 2016.

“We do not like the consequences of having a large number of Muslim communities that we see in other countries… That is a historical experience for us.” — Hungarian President Viktor Orbán, September 3, 2015.

“We lose our European values and identity the way frogs are cooked in slowly-heating water. Quite simply, slowly there will be more and more Muslims, and we will no longer recognize Europe.” — Hungarian President Viktor Orbán, September 30, 2016.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has proposed amending the Constitution to prevent the European Union from settling migrants in Hungary without the approval of Parliament.

In a speech on October 4, Orbán said the amendment would be presented to Parliament on October 10, and, if approved, it would come into effect on November 8.

Hungarian voters overwhelmingly rejected the European Union’s mandatory migrant relocation plan in a referendum on October 2, but failed to turn out in sufficient numbers to make the referendum legally binding.

More than 97% of those who voted in the referendum answered ‘no’ to the question: “Do you want the European Union to be entitled to prescribe the mandatory settlement of non-Hungarian citizens in Hungary without the consent of the National Assembly?”

Voter turnout was only 40%, however, far short of the 50% participation required to make the referendum valid under Hungarian law.

Orbán has been a vocal opponent of the EU’s plan to relocate 160,000 “asylum seekers” from Greece and Italy. Under the scheme, 1,294 migrants would be moved to Hungary. The Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia, all former Communist countries, are also opposed to the EU plan, which they say is an “EU diktat” that infringes on national sovereignty.

Although the referendum has been invalidated, Orbán — whose eurosceptic Fidesz party has more support than all opposition parties combined — said he would not be deterred. Speaking to supporters after the polls closed, he said:

“The European Union’s proposal is to let the migrants in and distribute them in mandatory fashion among the member states and for Brussels to decide about this distribution. Hungarians today considered this proposal and they rejected it. Hungarians decided that only we Hungarians can decide with whom we want to live. The question was ‘Brussels or Budapest’ and we decided this issue is exclusively the competence of Budapest.”

In an address to Parliament on October 3, Orbán hailed the vote as a “great victory” and reiterated his plan to amend the Hungarian Constitution to ensure that the EU cannot settle migrants in Hungary. He said:

“No party or party alliance in the history of Hungarian democracy has ever received such a large mandate. I’m telling you with sufficient gentleness, we will not let the opinion of the 3.3 million people who voted ‘no’ to be ignored.

“… with sufficient modesty and restraint I must say that Hungarians made history yesterday. If it is true that history is written by the victors then with a resounding victory of the ‘no’ votes Hungary won yesterday.”

In Brussels, Margaritis Schinas, chief spokesperson for European Commission, the powerful administrative arm of the European Union, said that regardless of the referendum, EU law still takes precedence over Hungarian law. He said:

“On the referendum, if it had been legally valid, our comment would have been that we take note of it. Since it was declared legally void by the Hungarian electoral commission, we can now say that we also take note of it…. One of the principals underpinning the system is the primacy of EU law.”

The EU’s unrelenting stance, and Orbán’s continued opposition to it, implies that the intra-European fight over what to do with hundreds of thousands of migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East is far from over.

Some 400,000 migrants passed through Hungary in 2015 on their way toward Western Europe. Since then, Hungary has built fences on its borders with Serbia and Croatia, effectively cutting off the so-called Western Balkan Route, which constitutes the main land route through Eastern Europe for migrants who enter the EU from Turkey via Greece and Bulgaria.

Orbán, who has emerged as the standard-bearer of European opposition to German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s “open-door” migration policy, has rejected criticism of the fences. In a July 11, 2016 article in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, he wrote:

“In the summer of 2015, with complete disregard for European rules, more than ten thousand migrants a day were arriving at the Hungarian-Serbian border. These people had already been in the territory of another Member State: in the territory of both the EU and the Schengen Area. As it is the responsibility of a country on the Schengen Area’s external border to ensure that the crossing of that external border is controlled, Hungary had no choice but to erect a physical barrier.

“Germany, and a considerable section of German public opinion, were unable to comprehend — and some people are still unable to do so — how Hungary, the country that tore down the iron curtain, could resort to such a measure.

“I understand how German society, which for decades was divided by walls and barbed wire, dislikes the fence. But if anyone has the moral standing to explain this to their German friends, surely the Hungarians do. After all, it was Hungary that cut through the Iron Curtain which divided Europe — and the German people — in the decades after the Second World War….

“In 1989 we dismantled a fence which divided the peoples of Europe. In the early autumn of 2015 we erected a fence on the external green border of the European Union and the Schengen Area. This was to protect the European Union’s greatest achievement: free movement within the common area of the internal market. This free movement is protected by the Schengen Agreement, in accordance with jointly agreed European regulations ratified many years ago. As a result, we have been protecting the European people’s way of life and economic model — at least on the section of Europe’s external border for which we are responsible. And, no less crucially, we have been protecting their security….

“When some people hear comments such as these they automatically react with the accusation of populism. As Shakespeare would put it, however, populists are people who call a spade a spade. We Hungarians call things by their names. This is part of our nature. We do not want to distribute the migration burdens falling on Europe, but we want to eliminate them: to put an end to them.”

At a news conference after a meeting with other European leaders in Brussels, Orbán said:

“We don’t want to, and I think we have a right to decide that we do not want a large number of Muslim people in our country. We do not like the consequences of having a large number of Muslim communities that we see in other countries and I do not see any reason for anyone else to force us to create ways of living together in Hungary that we do not want to see. That is a historical experience for us.”

Orbán was referring to the 150-year Ottoman Turkish occupation of Hungary, which began with the Siege of Buda in 1541, and ended with the Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699, when the Ottomans ceded Hungary to the Habsburg Monarchy.

The Ottoman conquest of Hungary actually began at the Battle of Mohács in 1526, when Turkish forces led by Sultan Suleiman I destroyed the Hungarian army and partitioned the country. Some 15,000 Hungarian troops were killed in the battle and many of those who survived were beheaded by Turkish forces.

Over the next century and a half, the Ottoman forces occupying Hungary plundered and pillaged the land and took more than a million Hungarians as slaves, according to Paul Fregosi, the author of Jihad, a history of Muslim holy war against Christians.

In a September 3, 2015 essay published by Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Orbán wrote:

“Let us not forget that those arriving have been raised in another religion, and represent a radically different culture. Most of them are not Christians, but Muslims. This is an important question, because Europe and European identity is rooted in Christianity. Is it not worrying in itself that European Christianity is now barely able to keep Europe Christian? If we lose sight of this, the idea of Europe could become a minority interest in its own continent.”

Speaking at a September 30, 2016 rally in support of the referendum, Orbán said:

“We lose our European values and identity the way frogs are cooked in slowly-heating water. Quite simply, slowly there will be more and more Muslims, and we will no longer recognize Europe. What we have seen so far from the people’s migration have only been warm-up rounds. The real battle is yet to come.”

When asked if he thought the EU could override Hungarian law, Orbán replied:

“I can’t imagine that there is a state among the democratic community of Europe which says clearly that it doesn’t want something, and then in another capital, they try to override it. Brussels, for example.

“I think this would be unprecedented in the history of the European Union, so I don’t think there would be a decision like this, a decision raping democracy. I have a much better opinion of the European Union.”

Soeren Kern is a Senior Fellow at the New York-basedGatestone Institute. He is also Senior Fellow for European Politics at the Madrid-based Grupo de Estudios Estratégicos / Strategic Studies Group. Follow him onFacebook and onTwitter.

STOCKHOLM, Sweden – Visits to predominantly Muslim suburbs emerging outside nearly all northern European cities, one question keeps recurring: Why have some of the richest, most educated, most secular, most placid, and most homogeneous countries in the world willingly opened their doors to virtually any migrant from the poorest, least modern, most religious, and least stable countries?

Other questions follow: Why have mostly Christian countries decided to take in mostly Muslim immigrants? Why do so many Establishment politicians, most notably Germany’s Angela Merkel, ignore and revile those who increasing worry that this immigration is permanently changing the face of Europe? Why does it fall to the weaker Visegrád states of eastern Europe to articulate a patriotic rejection of this phenomenon? Where will the immigration lead to?

There’s no single answer that applies to multiple countries; but of the many factors (such as secularization) behind this historically unprecedented acceptance of alien peoples, one stands out as most critical: a west European sense of guilt.

To many educated western Europeans, their civilization is less about scientific advances, unprecedented levels of prosperity, and the achievement of unique human freedoms, and more about colonialism, racism, and fascism. The brutal French conquest of Algeria, the uniquely evil German genocide against the Jews, and the legacy of extreme nationalism cause many Europeans, in the analysis of Pascal Bruckner, a French intellectual, to see themselves as “the sick man of the planet,” responsible for every global problem from poverty to environmental rapacity; “the white man has sown grief and ruin wherever he has gone.” Affluence implies robbery, light skin manifests sinfulness.

Bruckner labels this the “tyranny of guilt” and I encountered some colorful expressions during my recent travels of such self-hatred. A French Catholic priest expressed remorse over the record of the Church. A conservative German intellectual preferred Syrians and Iraqis to his fellow Germans. A Swedish tour guide put down fellow Swedes and hoped he would not be perceived as one.

Indeed, many Europeans feel their guilt makes them superior; the more they dislike themselves, the more they preen – inspiring a strange mix of self-loathing and moral superiority that, among other consequence, leaves them reluctant to commit the time and money required to bear children. “Europe is losing faith in itself, and birth rates have collapsed,” notes Irish scientist William Reville.

The catastrophic birth dearth underway has created an existential demographic crisis. With women of the European Union bearing just 1.58 children as of 2014, the continent lacks the offspring to replace itself; over time, this far-less-than-replacement rate means a precipitous decline in the numbers of ethnic Portuguese, Greeks, and others. To maintain the welfare state and the pension machine requires importing foreigners.

These two drives – expiating guilt and replacing nonexistent children – then combine to encourage a massive influx of non-Western peoples, what the French writer Renaud Camus calls “the great replacement.” South Asians in the United Kingdom, North Africans in France, and Turks in Germany, plus Somalis, Palestinians, Kurds, and Afghans all over, can claim innocence of Europe’s historic sins even as they offer the prospect of staffing the economy. As the American writer Mark Steyn puts it, “Islam is now the principal supplier of new Europeans.”

The Establishment, or what I call the 6 P’s (politicians, police, prosecutors, the press, professors, and priests), generally insists that everything will turn out fine: Kurds will become productive workers, Somalis fine citizens, and Islamist problems will melt away.

That’s the theory and sometimes it works. Far too often, however, Muslim immigrants remain aloof from the culture of their new European home or reject it, as most clearly manifested by gender relations; some violently attack non-Muslims. Far too often too, they lack the skills or incentive to work hard and end up an economic liability.

The influx of non-integrating Muslim peoples raises the profound question whether Europe’s civilization of the past millennium can survive. Will England become Londonistan and France an Islamic republic? The Establishment castigates, dismisses, sidelines, ostracizes, suppresses, and even arrests those who raise such issues, demeaning them as right-wing extremists, racists, and neo-fascists.

Nonetheless, the prospect of Islamization prompts a growing number of Europeans to fight on behalf of their traditional way of life. Leaders include intellectuals such as the late Oriana Fallaci and novelist Michel Houellebecq; politicians such as Viktor Orbán, the prime minister of Hungary, and Geert Wilders, head of the most popular Dutch party.

Anti-immigration political parties typically win about 20 percent of the vote. And while a consensus has emerged that their appeal will stay about there, perhaps reaching 30 percent, they could well continue to grow. Opinion polls show that very substantial majorities fear Islam and want to stop and even reverse the effects of immigration, especially that of Muslims. In this light, Norbert Hofer recently winning 50 percent of the vote in Austria represents a potentially major breakthrough.

The greatest question facing Europe is who, Establishment or populace, will steer the continent’s future. The extent of Islamist political violence will likely decide this: a drumbeat of high-profile mass-murders (such as in France since January 2015) tilts the field toward the people; its absence allows the Establishment to remain in charge. Ironically, then, the actions of migrants will largely shape Europe’s destiny.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has railed against the political establishment’s migrant policy, calling for the deportation of over a million migrants from the European Union (EU).

Regularly at odds with EU leaders in Western Europe, the Hungarian Prime Minister has said that the political bloc needs to consider deporting over a million migrants who flooded into Europe over the last year, reportsSpiegel Online.

“All who have come illegally should be picked up and taken away,” Mr. Orbán told Hungarian media. After securing the borders of his own country, Mr. Orbán is taking his secure border ideology to the rest of the EU, targeting German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open-door migrant policy.

Mr. Orbán said that he didn’t want to see migrant camps set up within the borders of the EU but rather the bloc should create migrant camps on islands or on the North African coast. He proposed that the camps should be financed by EU member states, where all migrant claims could be rigorously scrutinised before those designated as ‘refugees’ are allowed into the bloc.

The lack of background checks has led to radical Islamic extremists, including members of Islamic State, being admitted into the EU. So-called ‘refugees’ have gone on to commit acts of terror in Paris, Brussels, and several cities in Germany. Law enforcement officials have been alarmed by the scale of the network of Islamic State-linked fighters who were able to walk into Europe thanks to the migrant crisis.

Processing migrants offshore is a system that Australia has practised for years and has been proposed by Austrian Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz for incoming migrants. Mr. Orbán’s idea to remove existing migrants from Germany and elsewhere and place them overseas is a more radical version of the plan.

These comments come less than two weeks before the Hungarian people vote in a referendum on whether or not to accept any migrants into Hungary as part of the EU’s proposed migrant redistribution policy. Mr. Orbán hopes that the people will vote to not allow migrants to be sent from Western Europe to Hungary, and polls show that the Hungarian people strongly support his tough stance.

Earlier this week Mr. Orbán’s spokesman Zoltan Kovacs spoke in Brussels and attacked the so-called “migrant helpers” who drive many migrants out of Hungary and across the borders to Austria and Germany, calling them organised criminals. Mr. Kovacs also noted that if the government won the referendum, the EU could expect even tougher migrant laws to be passed in the Central European nation.

Tanveer Ahmed (right), a Sunni Muslim, was sentenced to 27 years in prison for the murdering Asad Shah (left), who belonged to the Ahmadi branch of Islam. Ahmed confessed to killing Shah in Glasgow because he claimed Shah had “disrespected the Prophet Mohammed.”

“To use the term ‘honor killing’ when describing the murder of a family member — overwhelmingly females — due to the perpetrators’ belief that they have brought ‘shame’ on a family normalizes murder for cultural reasons and sets it apart from other killings when there should be no distinction.” — Jane Collins, MEP, UK Independence Party.

Voter fraud has been deliberately overlooked in Muslim communities because of “political correctness,” according to Sir Eric Pickles, author of a government report on voter fraud.

“Not only should we raise the flag, but everybody in the Muslim community should have to pledge loyalty to Britain in schools. There is no conflict between being a Muslim and a Briton.” — Khalil Yousuf, spokesman for the Ahmadiyya Muslim community.

Only a tiny proportion — between five and ten percent — of the people whose asylum applications are denied are actually deported, according to a British asylum judge, quoted in the Daily Mail.

Police in Telford — dubbed the child sex capital of Britain — were accused of covering up allegations that hundreds of children in the town were sexually exploited by Pakistani sex gangs.

August 1. Nearly 900 Syrians in Britain were arrested in 2015 for crimes including rape and child abuse, police statistics revealed. The British government has pledged to resettle up to 20,000 Syrian refugees in the UK by the end of 2020. “The government seems not to have vetted those it has invited into the country,” said MEP Ray Finch. The disclosure came after Northumbria Police and the BBC were accused of covering up allegations that a gang of Syrians sexually assaulted two teenage girls in a park in Newcastle.

August 1. Male refugees settling in Britain must receive formal training on how to treat women, a senior Labour MP said. Thangam Debbonaire, chairman of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Refugees, called for a “refugee integration strategy” so that men “understand what is expected of them.” She said it could help prevent sexual harassment and issues “including genital mutilation.”

August 2. Jane Collins, MEP for the UK Independence Party (UKIP), launched a petition calling for the BBC to stop using the term “honor killing.” The petition says the term “cultural murder” should be used instead. It states:

“To use the term ‘honor killing’ when describing the murder of a family member — overwhelmingly females — due to the perpetrators’ belief that they have brought ‘shame’ on a family normalizes murder for cultural reasons and sets it apart from other killings when there should be no distinction.

“Murder is murder, whether it be for cultural excuses or others. The term ‘honor killing’ is a euphemism for a brutal murder based on cultural beliefs which have no place in Britain or anywhere else in the world.”

August 3. Zakaria Bulhan, a 19-year-old Norwegian man of Somali descent, stabbed to death an American woman in London’s Russell Square. He also wounded five others. Police dismissed terror as a possible motive for the attack, which they blamed on mental health problems. But HeatStreet, a news and opinion website, revealed that Bulhan had uploaded books advocating violent jihad on social media sites.

August 4. A public swimming pool in Luton announced gender-segregated sessions for “cultural reasons.” The move will give men exclusive access to the larger 50-meter pool, while women will have to use the smaller 20-meter pool. The gender-segregated sessions are named ‘Alhamdulillahswimming,’ an Arabic phrase which means “Praise be to Allah.” UKIP MEP Jane Collins said the decision to have segregated times for swimming was “a step backwards for community relations and gender equality.” She added:

“The leisure center said this is for cultural reasons and I think we all know that means for the Muslim community. This kind of behavior, pandering to one group, harms community relations and creates tension. Under English law we have equality between men and women. This is not the same in cultures that believe in Sharia Law.”

August 5. Egyptian members of the Muslim Brotherhood may be allowed to seek asylum in Britain, according to new guidance from the Home Office. The document states that high profile or politically active members

“may be able to show that they are at risk of persecution, including of being held in detention, where they may be at risk of ill-treatment, trial also without due process and disproportionate punishment…. In such cases, a grant of asylum will be appropriate.”

The new guidance contradicts previous government policy. In December 2015, then Prime Minister David Cameron said Britain would “refuse visas to members and associates of the Muslim Brotherhood who are on record as having made extremist comments.”

August 5. Stephen Bennett, a 39-year-old father of seven from Manchester, was sentenced to 180 hours of community service for posting “grossly offensive” anti-Muslim comments on Facebook. One of the offending comments: “Don’t come over to this country and treat it like your own. Britain first.” He was arrested under the Malicious Communications Act. The judge said Bennett, whose mother-in-law and sister-in-law are Muslims, was guilty of “running the risk of stirring up racial hatred.” He described it as “conduct capable of playing into the hands of the enemies of this country.”

August 6. British MPs face a six-year alcohol ban when the Palace of Westminster, which has dozens of bars and restaurants, undergoes a multi-billion-pound refurbishment beginning in 2020. They will move to an office building operating under Islamic Sharia law. Their new home, Richmond House, is one of three government buildings which switched ownership from British taxpayers to Middle Eastern investors in 2014 to finance a £200 million Islamic bond scheme — as part of an effort to make the UK a global hub for Islamic finance. Critics say the scheme effectively imposes Sharia law onto government premises.

August 8. Lisa Duffy, a candidate to succeed Nigel Farage as leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), called for a ban on Muslim women wearing a veil in public buildings, shopping centers and on buses and trains. She also demanded that Islamic faith schools be closed to combat radicalization, as well as a “complete and comprehensive ban” on Sharia courts in the UK. She said the veil is “a symbol of aggressive separatism that can only foster extremism” and claimed that it is often “forced on women by men who view them as their property.”

August 8. Stanley Johnson, a former Conservative MEP and Chairman of the European Parliament’s Intergroup Group on Animal Welfare, called for all halal meat offered for sale in the UK to be clearly labeled as such. He wrote:

“The halal market is worth £2.6 billion in Britain alone, and the export market is also growing particularly in the Middle East. Most of us eat halal meat unwittingly on a daily basis, since it is sold in most major outlets, including big brand-name supermarkets, without being labelled as such.”

August 9. Tanveer Ahmed, a 32-year-old taxi driver from Bradford, was sentenced to 27 years in prison for the “barbaric, premeditated” murder of a shopkeeper in Glasgow. Ahmed admitted to repeatedly stabbing Asad Shah to death outside his shop in March 2016 in a sectarian attack motivated by hatred of Shah’s religious views.

Ahmed, a Sunni Muslim, confessed to attacking Shah, who belonged to the Ahmadi branch of Islam, which believes Mohammed was not the final Muslim prophet. As he was led from the dock, Ahmed raised a clenched fist and shouted in Arabic: “Praise for the Prophet Mohammed, there is only one Prophet.” His cry was repeated by supporters in the public gallery.

Soeren Kern is a Senior Fellow at the New York-basedGatestone Institute. He is also Senior Fellow for European Politics at the Madrid-based Grupo de Estudios Estratégicos / Strategic Studies Group. Follow him onFacebook and onTwitter.

How much worse will Islamist terrorism in Europe get? According to French scholar Gilles Kepel of the Sciences Po institute, it is likely to get so much worse that European states fall into civil war over government inability to stop it.

Professor Gilles Kepel, from the Sciences Po in Paris, France, said a growing ‘Jihad Generation’ is likely to continue to carry out terror acts in European cities. The aim of their terror activity is to both incite hatred towards Muslims and, in doing so, cause further radicalisation among young people, the professor of political science said.

He told the German newspaper Die Welt that this in turn could lead to the point where Europe enters into civil war.

Specifically, Kepel is concerned that this continual wave of terror attacks cannot be effectively stopped by traditional policing methods. The French government seems to agree, as French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said this week that there would definitely be more successful attacks even though his government is stopping attacks “every day.”

Partially this is because police do not have anything like the resources they would need. The numbers of Muslims on terrorism watch lists in France alone tops 15,000, having tripled in recent months. It takes many police officers to establish a full-time watch on one particular suspect. The French have far less capacity to watch these suspects than does the American FBI, and even they have only “a few dozen” surveillance teams — far too few to watch the thousand-plus suspected Islamic terrorists here. There is simply no way for police work alone to deal with so large a problem.

Thus, terrorist acts on the scale of the recent Paris attacks are likely to continue, and the European populations will eventually find it intolerable. They will then move to expel Islam from Europe by endorsing right wing parties, Kepel says, and that will lead to the civil wars he fears.

The long-term goal of the Jihad Generation is to destroy Europe through civil war and then build an Islamic society from the ashes, Prof. Kepel said. The strategy is similar to the expansion of Islamic State in Syria, Iraq, and Libya where the terrorist organisation was able to use the chaos of civil war to slowly build its forces, grow in power, and rapidly seize territory.

There are things that can be done to lessen the danger, according to Professor Kepel. One of the main ones is that Islamic leaders should reject Salafism, a form of Islam that requires a kind of disconnection from the secular states characteristic of contemporary Europe. Kepel proposes that Islamic scholars have a “duty” to reject Salafism, and that most are failing this duty by remaining silent in the face of a rising tide of this ideological movement.

The young are particular persuaded by Salafi ideas, according to Breitbart, as also are thought to be the recent immigrant wave from the crises in the Middle East. They point out that Germany has begun to raid Salafi preachers, targeting some 45,000 in recent months. But of course that returns our attention to the scale of the problem. Raiding 45,000 homes is possible. Monitoring 45,000 preachers full time is probably quite beyond the resources of any European state, and possibly beyond even the United States.

A 29-year old woman who became radicalized as a teenager was arrested September 7 with her boyfriend after leaving a car containing gas cylinders across from Paris’ famous Notre Dame Cathedral.

The woman, who was known to police and on a terror watch list, disappeared Sunday after telling her parents she was going away for the weekend.

The car, which contained seven gas canisters – six full and one empty — was found in the early morning hours with its flashers blinking in a no-parking zone in Paris’ Rue du Petit-Point across the River Seine from Notre Dame. After two hours, a local resident became suspicious and alerted the police.

Although the car had no license plates, police were able to trace the vehicle to the couple through DNA samples and tracked the two down close to the southern city of Orange.

A source close to the case said the couple was “trying to escape to Spain.” The woman had expressed a desire to run away and join the Islamic State, according to her father.

The teenage son of an extremist imam in Belgium, was arrested after his face became known to police for a video in which he was seen walking down the street and calling for the murder of Christians. While in custody, the teenager told police that the Islamic State is recruiting supporters to murder Christians in Belgium.

Two of the planned attacks involved chainsaws in shopping centers.

The teenager, whose name was withheld from the press due to his age, is the son of radical preacher Shayh Alami from the eastern Belgian city of Verviers, which has been called by the Belgian media “one of the most important breeding grounds for Islamists in Belgium.”

New documents obtained by CNN show that the terrorists behind the November 2015 Paris attacks had planned much worse. The new details were obtained from two captured Islamic State operatives who were believed to have intended as well to carry out attacks that night.

The documents also speak of another unnamed terrorist who was connected to the Paris attackers and who remained at large in Europe for months after the attacks. He has since been identified as Abid Tabaouni and was arrested in July.

The documents show that the Islamic State is running a highly organized operation in Europe, including sleeper cells who, at present, are awaiting attack orders from the group’s headquarters in Syria. The investigations, which amounted to 90,000 pages of interrogations, findings and other data, show how the terrorists use encrypted social media apps to communicate with each other. Data also shows that ISIS is increasing its effort to infiltrate the UK and carry out attacks there.

Germany has a Federal system of government, in which a number of states exist and govern areas of the country, while an overarching Federal government handles foreign affairs and other powers. The next general election for Germany’s Federal government is just over a year away, and between now and then there will be votes in the several states.

In May 2016, the AfD adopted an explicitly anti-Islam policy, and its programme (in German) has a section explaining why it believes “Islam does not belong to Germany”.

There is no room for Muslim practices and beliefs that go against “the free, democratic social foundation, our laws and the Judaeo-Christian and humanistic bases of our culture”, it says.

So the AfD would ban foreign funding of mosques in Germany, ban the burka (full-body veil) and the Muslim call to prayer, and put all imams through a state vetting procedure.

“Moderate” Muslims who accept integration are “valued members of society”, the programme says. But it argues that multiculturalism does not work.

Naturally the international press is understanding this German nationalism as a sort of echo of Nazi politics. The BBC report cited above mentions that AfD members often clash with the press, calling them “‘Luegenpresse’ (‘lying press’), which has echoes of the Nazi era.” This is one of those occasions when Nazi analogies turn out to be unreasonably weak. Accusations that the press has been unfair in its coverage of them are universal among insurgent political parties of any ideological stripe, and are often warranted. As invaluable as a free press is to a free society, it has the same human tendencies to curry favor with the powerful and dismiss those seen as ‘on the fringe’ as anyone else.

“I am voting AfD. The main reason is the question over asylum-seekers,” a pensioner and former teacher who declined to be named told AFP news agency.

“A million refugees have come here. There is money for them, but no money to bring pensions in the east to the same levels as those of the west,” he said, referring to the lower retirement payments that residents of former Communist states receive compared with those in the west.

If it is already the case that Germany is suffering from an official inequality in its welfare system that it is unable to rectify, it makes no sense to swell welfare rolls. Likewise, the AfD plan to insist that Muslims who come to Germany must endorse its version of the Constitution — “the Basic Law” — as binding regardless of religious views is merely to ask of immigrants what is asked of everyone else. It would be impossible to manage a stable society with a large and growing element that rejected the basic law of the land where it conflicted with their religious values.

“We don’t want to change the character of our country,” Orban said. “We want to remain Hungarian, to keep our religious and ethnic composition. That view isn’t popular in Europe nowadays, at least among politicians.”

A clear referendum result would help to convey that message to Brussels, he said. “They want to force rules on member states that are in conflict with their interests, including Hungary’s. We are preparing for a conflict,” he added.

Hungary’s “basic law” actually contains a provision mandating that the government always view Hungary as chiefly the home for Hungarians. The question that Merkel’s influence in Europe is bringing to the fore is whether such a constitution is permitted any longer in the new Europe. Orban and the AfD argue not only that it is, but that it ought to be. Voters seem to be coming around to their view.

Hugh Fitzgerald posted a 3,300-word piece at JihadWatch.com responding to a news item about Thomas Strothotte, president of Kühne Logistics University in Hamburg, Germany, advocating that all school children learn Arabic until 12 or 13 years of age; Fitzgerald called this a sign of “civilizational surrender.”

But I went to the source of the news item in Die Welt and tweeted the news item in exactly the opposite way, noting that 94 percent of respondents answered negatively to a straw poll asking, “Should the Arabic language become a compulsory subject in Germany?” (“Sollte Arabisch in Deutschland zum Pflichtfach werden?“)

That the mildly-conservative Welt-reading public with near-unanimity rejected Strothotte’s suggestion seems to me far more newsworthy than the original suggestion.

More neatly than anything else I can think of, this contrast between Fitzgerald’s and my reporting points to the divergence between two fundamentally different ways of seeing the West’s evolution vis-à-vis Islamism: one focuses on the statements and actions of a diminishing elite appeasement faction; the other follows the increasingly strong negative response by the population at large.

Yes, Islamism is making advances. But anti-Islamism is growing more rapidly and so, I predict the latter will prevail.

As non-Muslims come to understand the Islamist challenge, anti-Islamic sentiments in the West are increasing, probably at a faster rate than Islamic practices. As anti-Islam trumps Islam, (I have concluded) opinions “will grow yet more hostile to Islamism over time. In this way, Islamist aggression assures that anti-Islamism in the West is winning its race with Islamism.”

Correct prediction? To keep track, this weblog entry documents the course of Western public opinion on a bundle of topics connected to Islam, including democracy, immigration, jihad, Shari’a, and women. To start with, two polls:

United States: A Chicago Council on Global Affairs survey finds that the rise of ISIS has causedAmerican concern about Islamism to jump 15 percentage points over the 2014 survey, returning to near the post-9/11 levels. (September 15, 2015)

France: Asked in a survey by the Journal de Dimanche about the marriage of a child to various partners, Muslims came in last, with

Sixteen years ago, when Dutch commentator Paul Scheffer published his “Multicultural Drama” declaring that multiculturalism in the Netherlands had failed, the response was swift and angry. Critics across Europe called him racist, bigoted, nationalistic. Others dismissed his views as mere rants and ramblings of a Leftist in search of a cause.

Not anymore.

With over 275 people killed in 10 Islamic terrorist attacks since January 2015, Europeans harbor no more illusions about the multiculturalist vision: where immigrants from Muslim countries are concerned, that idealist vision has more than just failed. It has produced a culture of hatred, fear, and unrelenting danger. Now, with European Muslim youth radicalizing at an unprecedented rate and the threat of new terrorist attacks, Europe is reassessing its handling of Muslim communities and its counterterrorism strategies and laws.

Among the changes being considered are a reversal of laws that allow radical Muslims to receive handouts from the very governments they seek to destroy; restricting foreign funding of mosques; and stronger surveillance on private citizens.

Chief among the new counterterrorism approaches is a program to coordinate intelligence data among European Union countries – a tactic that has not been pursued with any regularity or such depth before now. But following the November attacks in Paris, the Dutch intelligence agency AIVD initiated weekly meetings among intel agencies from all EU countries, Switzerland, and Norway, with the objective of sharing information, exchanging new clues, insights, and suspect alerts, and discussing improvements to a Europe-wide system of counterterrorism and intelligence.

Through these meetings and the improved shared database, it is now possible for each country to contextualize its intelligence and understand links between individuals and various groups from one city to another – and so, between radicals and radical groups as they pass through a borderless EU.

Concurrently, EU members are now beginning to share information about web sites and even details about private citizens where needed. Most countries had been reluctant to make such exchanges, citing both privacy concerns and the need to protect their sources. Other cooperative efforts include an EU initiative begun in February 2015 to counteract Islamic extremist propaganda. The project received a major €400 million boost in June, indicating the high priority Europe now places on fighting recruitment.

Earlier this month, Europol began a new effort to screen refugees still awaiting placement in Greek asylum centers. According to a report from Europa Nu, an initiative between the European parliament and the University of Leiden, Europol agents “specifically trained to unmask and dismantle terrorists and terror networks” will be dispatched to the camps to try to prevent terrorists from infiltrating the flood of refugees to Europe.

Some EU measures, however, have been based more in politics than counterterrorism, including efforts to crack down on the ability of radical Muslims to benefit from welfare programs. British citizens, for instance, reacted with outrage when it was discovered that the family of “Jihadi John” had received over £400,000 in taxpayer support over the course of 20 years. In Belgium, Salah Abdeslam, the terrorist accused of participating in the Nov. 13 Paris attacks, pulled in nearly €19,000 in welfare benefits from January 2014 and October 2015, according to Elsevier. And Gatestone reports that more than 30 Danish jihadists received a total of €51,000 in unemployment benefits all while battling alongside the Islamic State in Syria.

Such concerns have also spread to the United States. Earlier this year, U.S. Rep. Bruce Poliquin, R-Maine, introduced the “No Welfare For Terrorists Act.”

“Terrorist victims and their families should never be forced to fund those who harmed them,” he said in a statement. “This bill guarantees this will never happen.”

But not all of Europe’s new approaches to the terror threat are being coordinated out of Brussels. Many more, in fact, are country-specific, such as England’s decision to follow an example set earlier by the Netherlands and Spain, separating jailed terrorists and terror suspects from other prisoners. The measures follow others the country adopted after the July 7, 2005 bombings of a London underground and buses, to criminalize “those who glorify terrorism, those involved in acts preparatory to terrorism, and those who advocate it without being directly involved,” the New York Times reported.

In fact, prisons worldwide, including in the U.S., have long been viewed as warm breeding grounds for radicals and potential terrorists. Ahmed Coulibaly, the gunman at the Porte de Vincennes siege in January 2015, was serving time for a bank robbery, for instance, when he met Cherif Koauachi, one of the Charlie Hebdo attackers. Both converted to Islam there. It was in that same prison that the two encountered Djamel Beghal, an al-Qaida operative who attempted to blow up the American Embassy in Paris in 2001.

Hence many experts now argue in favor of isolating those held on terrorism-related charges as a way to stop them from radicalizing their fellow inmates.

Yet British officials have until now resisted creating separate wings for terror suspects, arguing that doing so gives them “credibility” and makes it harder to rehabilitate them. But a recent government report on Islamist extremism in British prisons forced a change in thinking, in part by noting that “other prisoners – both Muslim and non-Muslim – serving sentences for crimes unrelated to terrorism are nonetheless vulnerable to radicalization by Islamist Extremists [sic].”

Similarly, France, the site of the worst attacks of the past two years, also balked at first at the idea of separating terrorists from other prisoners, arguing that doing so “forms a terrorist cell within a prison.” But the Charlie Hebdo attacks of January 2015 changed all that. Now, officials are even going further, looking at other potential sources of radicalization: the mosques.

Shortly after the Bastille Day attack in Nice, Prime Minister Manuel Valls announced plans to ban foreign financing for French mosques as part of an effort to establish a “French Islam,” led by imams trained only in France. France hosts dozens of foreign-financed mosques – many sponsored by Saudi Arabia and Morocco – which preach Salafism, an extreme version of Islam practiced in the Saudi Kingdom and the root of much radical Islamist ideology. And according to a new report on counter-radicalization, about 300 imams come from outside France.

That same report also calls for “regular surveys” of France’s 4-5 million Muslims, according to France 24, in order “to acquire a better understanding of this population in a country where statistics based on religious, ethnic, or racial criteria are banned.”

Both proposed measures have been met with resistance. The “surveys,” as even the report itself notes, are a means of circumventing laws against gathering information on the basis of religious criteria – and so, go against democratic principles. And many French officials also oppose the ban on foreign funding for mosques, arguing that French government intervention in places of worship contradicts separation between church and state. Besides, they claim, radicalization doesn’t take place there anyway.

But Dutch authorities and counter-extremism experts are not so sure. The announcement earlier this month that Qatar would finance an Islamic center in Rotterdam, for instance, set off alarms even among Muslim moderates, including Rotterdam’s Moroccan-born mayor Ahmed Marcouch. There are good reasons for this. The Salafist Eid Charity, which sponsors the project, has been on Israel’s terror list since 2008, according to Dutch daily NRC Handelsblad. Moreover, in 2013 the U.S. Treasury Department accused the charity’s founder, Abd al-Rahman al-Nu’aymi, of providing funding for al-Qaida and its affiliates, and named him a “specially designated global terrorist.”

Plans for the center sound much like those of the now-abandoned plans for New York’s “Ground Zero mosque,” with sports facilities, prayer space, tutoring for students, Islamic child care, and, reports Dutch newspaper Volkskrant, imam training.

Yet the center’s prospective director, Arnoud van Doorn, a convert to Islam and former member of the far-right, anti-Islam political party PVV, insists that any fears about the project are unfounded. “Our organization has nothing to do with extremism,” he told the NRC. “We want only to provide a positive contribution to Dutch society.”

Notably, though, France’s proposal to ban foreign mosque funding and the Qatari backing of the Rotterdam center point to some of the deepest roots of Europe’s radical Islam problem, and, despite all the new initiatives now underway, the greatest challenges to ending it. When Muslim immigrants came to Europe in the 1970s, they carved prayer spaces wherever they could: the backs of community grocery stores, in restaurants and tea rooms. But these soon became too small to handle the growing Muslim population. Mosques – real mosques – would have to be built.

But by whom? The Muslim communities themselves were too poor. Western governments, wedded to the separation of church and state, could not subsidize them with taxpayer funds. And so the door was opened to foreign – mostly Saudi – investment, and the placement of Saudi-trained and Saudi-backed imams in European mosques. Europe had, in essence, rolled out the welcome mat for Salafism.

Now they want to roll it in again. But is it too late? Even as Western intelligence is now uniting to fight radical Islam, Islamic countries are pooling together in Europe to expand it. The result, as Manuel Valls told French daily Le Monde, is that, “What’s at stake is the republic. And our shield is democracy.”

Hence as the number attacks against Western targets increase, many Europeans are coming to understand that preserving the core of that democracy may mean disrupting some of the tenets on which it’s built, like certain elements of privacy, for instance, and religious principles that violate the freedom that we stand for . It is, as it were, a matter of destroying even healthy trees to save the forest. But in this tug-of-war between the Islamic world’s efforts to shape the West, and Western efforts to save itself, only our commitment to the very heart of our ideals will define who wins this fight.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open-door immigration stance has cost Germans dearly – especially in regards to the sexual assault crisis, and the financial burden on German taxpayers. One assessment places a figure on the projected extra cost of educating refugee children in Germany at 67 billion Euros – signaling impending financial hardship. Breitbart provides some context for the number:

Around 40 per cent of the million+ people who arrived in Germany last year are believed to be 20 or younger, meaning the country could need up to 25,000 new teachers while migrant children are denied places because schools are already full.

Dieter Dohmen, president of the Research Institute for the Economics of Education and Social Affairs, said the report showed the challenge facing German authorities.

“We have done some new calculations which put the full cost of refugees coming to Germany at €67 billion through their whole education pathway,” he said.

“If we look at the numbers so far some 200,000 have to go to kindergarten while another 300,000 will have to go to school. Then there is vocational education and training and higher education.

“If you look at someone who is three, they have to go to childcare, primary, secondary and higher education so this is a figure for the next 20 years.”

The as yet unpublished study anticipates that up to 1.5 million refugees aged 20 and under will enter Germany’s education and training system by 2020. It includes the cost of higher education in a country where university tuition is provided free of charge. The bill for 2016 is put at euros 15 billion.

This study apparently only deals with educating and training kids or young adults that are twenty years old and younger. Factoring in other refugee costs like government assistance for adult refugees who are unemployed raises that 67 billion Euros figure significantly. One can easily see that leftist immigration policies mixed with a European welfare system makes for a disaster, which gives Islamists and jihadists further reason to exploit this ‘migration’ crisis as much as possible.

Islamists are using this latest migration of Muslim refugees to further their long-term strategy known as “civilization jihad” – seeking to slowly change society from within so that it accords with the norms of Islam. By changing the demographics in favor of Islam they can take a major European country like Germany, with a Muslim population approaching five million people, and use it to Islamize the European Union.

With Recep Tayyip Erdogan at the helm of Turkish political power, the Islamists have a key player pushing this Islamization of Europe. It’s time for leaders like Merkel to realize that the continuation of the same policies will cause the Germany of tomorrow not only to be bankrupt, but also Islamic.

The conservative Freedom Party’s (FPO) Norbert Hofer is likely to become Austria’s next president. According to the latest polls, Hofer is a few points ahead of independent candidate Alexander Van der Bellen.

A poll of 600 people published by the Oesterreich tabloid showed the average support for Hofer at 53 percent, one point higher than a poll in late July, versus 47 percent for former Greens head Alexander Van der Bellen.Another poll, of 778 people with a margin of error of 3.6 percent, published by newspaper Kurier, found 38 percent thought Hofer would win while 34 percent expected Van der Bellen to.

Van der Bellen won the election earlier this year, but those results were canceled due to “to sloppiness in the count.” According to the official results, Van der Bellen won that election by a mere 31,000 votes.

From the looks of it, that’s set to change on October 2, when Austrians go to the voting booth for the second time this year.

Like many other conservative and populist parties (they’re often confused with each other, but they’re certainly not always the same thing: the PVV party of Geert Wilders in the Netherlands is, for instance, clearly populist, but it’s also in favor of big government and the welfare state), the FPO is benefiting from the migration crisis. Increasingly, more Austrians are dissatisfied with the traditional, more centrist parties that offer no solutions. Austrians see their country — and continent — being overrun by immigrants from the Middle East (people who do not share their values and beliefs, and who are making little to no effort to integrate).

In contrast to the old, traditional major parties, the FPO is clear about its views and policy proposals: the party wants to limit immigration and make sure that immigrants who do remain in Austria are fully integrated.

A victory for Hofer will mark an important shift in Austrian politics, especially because it’ll make it likely that the FPO will also stage a major win in the parliamentary elections scheduled for 2018. This means that the party may get the opportunity to finally put its ideas into practice — to fight back against decades of multiculturalism and unlimited immigration.

That’s good news, but there’s even more reason to be positive about Europe’s future: Alternative für Deutschland, Germany’s new truly conservative party (Chancellor Angela Merkel’s CDU hasn’t been conservative for years), is also rapidly on the rise. Although this party is routinely labeled “far right” by the media, it is no such thing. The party is conservative: pro-small government, pro-free markets, strict on immigration, and skeptical of the ever-growing power of the European Union. That does not, however, make them “far right,” which is obviously code for “neo-Nazi.”

Eastern Europe now has “the largest population loss in modern history”, while Germany overtook Japan by having the world’s lowest birth rate.

Europe, as it is aging, no longer renews its generations, and instead welcomes massive numbers of migrants from the Middle East, Africa and Asia, who are going to replace the native Europeans, and who are bringing cultures with radically different values about sex, science, political power, culture, economy and the relation between God and man.

Deaths that exceed births might sound like science fiction, but they are now Europe’s reality. It just happened. During 2015, 5.1 million babies were born in the EU, while 5.2 million persons died, meaning that the EU for the first time in modern history recorded a negative natural change in its population. The numbers come from Eurostat (the statistical office of the European Union), which since 1961 has been counting Europe’s population. It is official.

There is, however, another surprising number: the European population increased overall from 508.3 million to 510.1 million. Have you guessed why? The immigrant population increased, by about two million in one year, while the native European population was shrinking. It is the substitution of a population. Europe has lost the will to maintain or grow its population. The situation is as demographically as seismic as during the Great Plague of the 14th Century.

This shift is what the British demographer David Coleman described in his study, “Immigration and Ethnic Change in Low-Fertility Countries: A Third Demographic Transition.” Europe’s suicidal birth rate, coupled with migrants who multiply faster, will transform European culture. The declining fertility rate of native Europeans coincides, in fact, with the institutionalization of Islam in Europe and the “re-Islamization” of its Muslims.

In 2015, Portugal recorded the second-lowest birth rate in the European Union (8.3 per 1,000 inhabitants) and negative natural growth of -2.2 per 1,000 inhabitants. Which EU country had the lowest birth rate? Italy. Since the “baby boom” of the 1960s, in the country famous for its large families, the birth rate has more halved. In 2015, the number of births fell to 485,000, fewer than in any other year since the modern Italy was formed in 1861.

Out with the old, in with the new… Europe, as it is aging, no longer renews its generations, and instead welcomes massive numbers of migrants from the Middle East, Africa and Asia, who are going to replace the native Europeans, and who are bringing cultures with radically different values about sex, science, political power, culture, economy and the relation between God and man.

Some businesses are no longer even interested in European markets. Kimberly-Clark, which makes Huggies diapers, has pulled out of most of Europe. The market is simply not cost-effective. Meanwhile, Procter & Gamble, which produces Pampers diapers, has been investing in the business of the future: diapers for old people.

Europe is becoming gray; you can feel all the sadness of a world that has consumed itself. In 2008, the countries of the European Union saw the birth of 5,469,000 children. Five years later, there were nearly half a million fewer, 5,075,000 — a decrease of 7%. Fertility rates have not only fallen in countries with aching economies, such as Greece, but also in countries such as Norway, which sailed through the financial crisis.

As Lord Sacks recently said, “falling birth rates could spell the end of the West“. Europe, as it is aging, no longer renews its generations, and instead welcomes massive numbers of migrants from the Middle East, Africa and Asia, who are going to replace the native Europeans, and who are bringing cultures with radically different values about sex, science, political power, culture, economy and the relation between God and man.

Liberals and secularists tend to dismiss the importance of demographic and cultural issues. That is why the most important warnings come from some Christian leaders. The first to denounce this dramatic trend was a great Italian missionary, Father Piero Gheddo, who explained that, due to falling birth rates and religious apathy, “Islam would sooner rather than later conquer the majority in Europe”. He was followed by others, such as Lebanese Cardinal Bechara Rai, who leads the Eastern Catholics aligned with the Vatican. Rai warned that “Islam will conquer Europe by faith and birth rate“. A similar warning just came from yet another cardinal, Raymond Leo Burke.

In one generation from now, Europe will be unrecognizable. People in Europe now largely seem to feel that the identity of their civilization is threatened primarily by a frivolous libertarianism, an ideology under the guise of freedom, that wants to deconstruct all the ties that bind man to his family, his parentage, his work, his history, his religion, his language, his nation, his freedom. It seems to come from an inertia that does not care if Europe succeeds or succumbs, if our civilization disappears, drowned by ethnic chaos, or is overrun by a new religion from the desert.

As a paper in the Washington Quarterly explains, the fatal meeting between Europe’s falling birth rates and rise of Islam has already had significant consequences: Europe has turned into an incubator of terrorism; formed a new poisonous anti-Semitism; seen a political shift to the far right; undergone the biggest crisis in European authoritarian unity and witnessed a refocusing of foreign policy since Europe’s withdrawal from the Middle East.

Demographic suicide is not only experienced; it appears to be wanted. The xenophile European bourgeoisie, which today controls politics and the media, seem imbued with a snobbish and masochistic racism. They have turned against the values of their own Judeo-Christian culture and combined it with a hallucinatory, romanticized view of the values of other cultures. The sad paradox is that Europeans are now importing young people in large numbers from the Middle East to compensate for their lifestyle choices.

An agnostic and sterile continent — deprived of its gods and children because it banished them — will have no strength to fight or to assimilate a civilization of the zealous and the young. The failure to counter the coming transformation seems to come down on the side of Islam. Is what we are seeing the last days of summer?

Giulio Meotti, Cultural Editor for Il Foglio, is an Italian journalist and author.